Inside Fabletics: How L&D is Preparing for an AI-First Future with Will Feng

What’s the role of L&D in the age of AI?

In this episode of The Leader Lab, Will Feng (VP of People, Fabletics) shares how TechStyle Fashion Group is rethinking learning, from the ground up. Hear how they’re developing human skills, engaging middle managers, and building an “AI-first mindset” across brands.

🎧 Tune in to learn:

• The power of peer-based learning and clear communication
• What an AI-first mindset really looks like
• How middle managers can be your greatest asset in transformation
• How they reached 90% L&D program participation 

A practical, real-world conversation for People leaders shaping the future of work.

Transcript

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The Leader Lab x Will Feng (Fabletics) 

Wed, 11/12 10:17AM · 49mins 

Transcript 

Will Feng 00:00 

My belief is that AI is not a technology challenge, it's a people culture and creativity challenge. And once we have we shifted that mindset or paradigm, we know, okay, it's not just about rolling out technology, implementing different tools, but it's about how people feel about the change and how we can look at individual team level organizational level to think about how we can help our people to feel less anxious about AI but more hopeful. 

Micaela Mathre 00:30 

Welcome to the Leader Lab podcast. I'm Micaela Mathre, Chief Marketing Officer at LifeLabs Learning. If you're a senior people leader, you're navigating a workplace that's changing faster than ever. This season, we're exploring what it really takes to build resilient and adaptable leaders, managers, and teams. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Leader Lab. Well, we are so thrilled to have you. 

Will Feng 00:53 

Thank you, Micaela. Thank you for having me here. 

Micaela Mathre 00:55 

Will Feng joins us today and he is an experienced people and organizational development leader with a passion for building systems that help people and companies thrive. As the current head of global learning and leadership development at Fabletics, he designs initiatives that strengthen leadership capability across several dynamic fashion brands, including Fabletics and Savage X Fenty, which some of our listeners may be familiar with. With an executive masters in organizational psychology and change leadership from Columbia University, Will brings both rigor and real world insight to his work. He is known as a systems thinker, a builder of collaborative communities and a specialist in organizational effectiveness. He helps teams navigate change, accelerate growth and achieve lasting impact through evidence-based frameworks, some of which we're gonna learn about. His scope also now has been expanded to include people and AI enablement, which we will also dive deep into because I know a lot of our listeners can relate to that recently expanded scope of work. At the core, Will is very dedicated to designing organizations and cultures that unlock potential so that leaders and teams can thrive, especially in this world of fast paced, high growth and dare I say, relentless change. All right, Will, we kick off every episode with the same question, so we'll start there to orient us. Can you tell us about one small behavioral shift that you have made recently as a leader and what impact it had? 

Will Feng 02:27 

So every Friday afternoon after work, I will take about 10 minutes to find a quiet place. So I work in a hybrid work environment where Friday I work from home. So I'll be in my home office and finding a quiet spot to reflect on what I have accomplished for that week. And then also reflecting on how am I feeling? What am I thinking for, for that week? Any learnings that I have taken away from that week and also planning within that 10 minutes planning, what are the two to three big rocks I would like to focus on for the following week? So I'm not like in the weeds every single day. Like I'm really being intentional about the big rocks I want to focus on and truly focus on those things. And of course there's, I call the whirlwind, right? Like there's fire, firefighting, like every, every day layer of people asking for things that urgent stuff that we need to get done, but this simple practice really helped me stay grounded with what are the most important things I need to get done. 

Micaela Mathre 03:29 

because the MIT is the most important thing. Can you give us an example of what has been a recent and one of your Friday reflections, what's been one of your rocks that you've kind of seen? 

Will Feng 03:40 

I will say last Friday, the conversation we're having is one of my big rocks for this week is really creating the space for our conversation. And so really spend the time to learn more about, you know, the podcasts we're doing here, and then prepare to make sure I stay present here and then having a quiet, quiet place. And then that's an example of a big rock, one of the big rocks I have this week. The other is we'll talk more about the AI adoption, the AI training, which is another big rock that's coming not only for this week, but for the next three months and beyond. 

Micaela Mathre 04:14 

Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. It's so important to us at life labs. Like everything we do is so focused on behavior change. And I love giving folks an example of like, okay, here's one thing that you can do and kind of walk away with and implement. And I think as leaders, everyone could relate to this today. Yeah, we're putting out fires constantly, right? It's like literally, you know, even now I'm like, I got to turn off the chat so that I could conversation with you. And it's so helpful to have those moments where you get 10,000 feet above and you're like, no, but really, what am I focused on and working on right now? 

Will Feng 04:50 

That's right. That's where I have like the time block 10 minutes every single Friday afternoon to do that reflection and then looking forward as well for the following week. 

Micaela Mathre 04:58 

Wonderful. All right, let's set a little bit of context for listeners. Let's start with actually you. Well, I'd love to hear about kind of your background and what brought you to your current role. 

Will Feng 05:08 

Yeah, I will say if you kind of look at my LinkedIn, I have very various titles throughout my career. I have a very non-linear career path. Currently, I'm leading our global learning and leadership development of athletics and supporting our sister brands as well, like Michaela, you mentioned earlier, and really exciting opportunity for us to grow our people. And that has been kind of aligned with my core value of helping people to grow healthy teams and organization to grow through different ways and providing tools and resources with the team leading the LMD team here. I went to school in Vancouver, Canada, spent about one in 10 years there. And after graduation, I worked as an engineer for about a year, I was working in research and development lab here actually in Torrance. And I didn't enjoy because I was not, you know, I missed the human connection, I wasn't talking to people, I was working in the lab, right? 10 hours a day, I was like, I like I missed that part. And I know I'm a people person, like I love to work with people. But then after a year, I was like, that's actually not for me. And that's where I cannot spend time to kind of reflect what do I really want, right? So I, I quit. And I was fortunate during that time, I met my mentor was the head of HR for the semiconductor company. And she asked me for, you know, she mentioned about this great opportunity to kind of start from learning and development and operating and leading our internal corporate university. And I know I have a heart really love education. So I took the leap of faith, no background in psychology, no background in like, you know, really around like education or human resources, just took the leap of faith from engineering to HR. But I think the reason I took the leap of faith is because I, I knew that was for me and my heart and I was able to kind of learn from A to Z everything from learning and development leading our corporate university, creating online contents and and also life in person and virtual session, like instructional designs, all aspects of LMD 

Micaela Mathre 07:10 

It always stands out to me so much how pivotal mentors can be, right? Like you're in this role and you're like, this is not for me. You're doing this job. And then you have somebody speaking into your life and sort of seeing you and seeing like your capabilities and how, what a huge impact that had. I'd love to hear a little bit about this expanded scope that you now have to really be thinking strategically about AI and AI enablement. How did that come about? And how did that become a part of your current role? 

Will Feng 07:37 

Yeah, I love that. And I will say we started this AI journey of fabletics, not this year has been quite a while, right, a couple years, but we started with really just more exploration, right, like experimentation of different tools. I hear a lot of technology discussion, right, discussion around what tools we should use, how do we put out sessions to help our people learn about chat GPT, co pilot and, you know, different AI tools. And from my experience, you know, working and focusing on change management, from my enterprise level, right approach. And I know that I remember reading this research, 70% of change fail, because we are not focusing on people, right, and culture, we are focusing on a lot of other things. And that's where earlier this year, when we start thinking about AI, and, and what at the organizational level, I have that observation, I was like, Okay, I think something is missing here. And that's where we talked a lot about tools, we invest in resources and money into different tools and try it out. But we don't have a really cohesive approach, a systems approach to how we are going to help our people adopt to AI. And so I started reaching out to the people who are more on the technology side or operational side of the business, we're leading AI adoption to say, Okay, what are you guys working on? And I'm part of the people team. So that's where I started having these like one off conversation, more of just understand being a helper, right, like helping understand, okay, what's working, what's not working. And that's where we started having this conversation before summer, around having a AI leadership offsite at the company. And given it's an offsite, it's kind of like in my space of facilitation around learning and really being a thought partner. So I was invited to be a sounding board to kind of design and develop our AI leadership offsite. And that's where we designed the AI first mindset workshop for our director plus level leaders. And fantastic opportunity for me to kind of think about what are the key mindsets for our leaders to cultivate this AI first culture at the company. And that's where I got to learn more about right the priorities and, and I was like, Okay, I think we need to talk more about the people the culture of the mindsets of AI, not just the tools. And my belief is that AI is not a technology challenge. It's a people, culture and creativity challenge. And once we have we shifted that mindset or paradigm, we know, okay, it's not just about rolling out technology implementing different tools, but it's about how people feel about the change, and how we can look at individual team level organizational level to think about how we can help our people to feel less anxious about AI, but more hopeful. 

Micaela Mathre 10:33 

There's a lot of fear around it, and we're going to dig more into that. I love your assessment of where the challenge is. Let's get into the specifics a little bit, because I have a follow-up question. Who was at that offsite? 

Will Feng 10:44 

Yeah, so we have all the director plus level leader. So director, senior director of VP, senior VP, all the way above, right, to executive level for our Fepiletics OS team together. So I think it's about 80 people together. And as an offsite, of course, we talk about various topic, but the theme is what's around AI. 

Micaela Mathre 11:05 

And then you said one of the outcomes of that was actually a workshop that you developed then for your director level. Let's zoom out a little bit just to give listeners a sense of actually, babletics. Can you give me kind of the high level? Are you distributed on site, hybrid? How many employees? Where are you located? So kind of paint the picture of the company for us. And then I'd love to hear a little bit more about the HR function and then where L&D sits within that as well. 

Will Feng 11:30 

Fibrillatics is an active leisure company and we are really, our mission is to inspire confidence in all through the fit and feel of an active luxury wear for our members. So we're also a member first subscription model business and we have over 2 million, I can close to 3 millions now globally and with over a hundred retail stores. So some of you might have visited our stores across the U S we're expanding to Europe as well, and then now into wholesale and the online platform through, uh, to reach to our members and really excited that now we are distributing to wholesale like Costco and, and, uh, yeah. And then global retailer and plus part of our culture is fun. So we are, we have this really fun culture where people, right. We have over 2000 employees globally and really get together. We have fun force, right. A community of people putting together fun events for our people. And we have weekly old hands where our CEO talk about what's important. Our OKRs are financial, uh, health and our products. So it's really a great community. 

Micaela Mathre 12:42 

Thanks for that context. And then tell me about the HR function and sort of where LND sits within that. 

Will Feng 12:47 

Yeah, so our HR function, we call it the global people team. We also call it GPT, sometimes it's a bit confusing for like now we have a chat GPT. Uh, but that's where I learned like the Gen Z they're called chat GPT as chat. They don't use the word chat GPT. So like, okay, that's chat. And then we have our team called global people team GPT. So, so, uh, we have, um, quite decent size of our HR team. We call people team here. So we have essentially the business partner model, right? The business partnering for a char and we also have center of excellence or CLEs. And then talent development or LMD is part of the center of excellence, the CLE function. We also have talent acquisition, our people operations team, our diversity and inclusion. And then so overall is, um, we call it the global people team to support everything around people and culture and operations. 

Micaela Mathre 13:39 

And then in your role within LND, are you supporting, you know, everyone from retail staff to folks, you know, kind of working remotely? Like, what does that look like? Are you kind of across the whole spectrum of brands? 

Will Feng 13:52 

So I oversee most LMD for our corporate functions, and we have partners within our community. For example, we have an LMD team for retail that we work closely on thinking about the tools, the resources, the philosophy, how we approach learning and development. We also have a LMD team for our global member services, which is our customer service team. So they are more our reach for the functional need. As you can probably imagine, our retail fleet is pretty big, and that's where we need training and development for retail, for customer service overall. I'm focusing more on the overall global headquarters. 

Micaela Mathre 14:29 

Let's jump in then and sort of talk about within the L and D function. We had a little bit of back and forth on this as we prepared for this around your learner segments. And I think this is thoroughly common within L and D, right? When you're thinking about your senior leaders, your middle managers, and then your individual contributors or your ICs for short, can you give us kind of the tiered approach that you have to leadership development across those segments? 

Will Feng 14:56 

One of our strategic pillars to develop a continuous learning culture is around this continue to offer steady state program and marketing and communication internally. So I kind of run our LMD function like a business, not like the traditional LMD. So meaning like, we are rolling out and designing and working with vendors like LafLafs to partner on sessions like for our individual, our contributors, our ICs, we call RISE IC programs, right? So RISE, so rising our people. And so that's RISE IC. And so that's a twice a year program we offer and they're cohort based, because we really want to create this community of learning to help our people to get together to build the community within and learn together to support each other. So it's not just working with LafLafs on like here are the training session, but really being intentional about our design is this continuous learning journey for the cohort members to be part of that program for learners to learn together. And so that's our RISE IC program, right? And they're self nominated or nominated by their managers or their peers. So it's not like a required assigned to you, because I know that oftentimes might not work for culture where you are, you make the trainings require a mandatory. So we really empower our managers, our people to kind of help each other for nomination or self nominated, right? Like they want to advance their career, we have these programs for them. So that's the first level, the RISE IC ICs. And then the next level, we call the RISE Manager program. And there are for first time first line managers or managers will need a refresher, right? Newly hired managers who might not have formal training and development in the past. And that's where we designed the RISE Manager program. And that progress more is a different model. So it's more of a flip classroom model, meaning we have our employees watch the LinkedIn learning course, we also have LinkedIn learning subscription. And that's where they watch the course, we come back, my team and I facilitated our session, for example, we just had a session this morning, get our people globally together, developing their management competencies, their skill and knowledge and abilities. And so that's also our cohort program, very similar to how we partner with life labs. So those programs are twice a year, they're different themes. And for example, spring, we talked about building healthy teams and in fall, for the season now, we talk about relationship management. So that's more of a bespoke partnering with LinkedIn learning program, it's about five weeks, again, cohort based, I would encourage right really love the cohort model, so versus individual learning. So that's the management layer. And then the next level up is director plus, we have programs to focus on hypo or high potential employees, director and senior directors and helping them with coaching one on one coaching, helping them with more high touch, white glove service programs. 

Will Feng 18:04 

So that one we partner with a vendor externally, and develop this program, which is about I think, six weeks, six to seven weeks, it's very intensive. And we work with that university, the top university in the US to build out these programs for our hypo. And I will say less than 10% of our employees leaders go through this program we call lift. And on top of that is our elevate program. I know, Michaela, we talked a little bit about this is for our VP, our vice presidents and above SVP as well across the globe. And the reason we have that program was because we didn't have a lot of really like tools and resources and programs for our senior level leaders. We do have coaching, but from my experience, my time here in the past almost two years, I learned that people at the higher level, really need opportunities as well. It's not just for ICM managers and directors and above, but also VP and SVP. So we could create this space and communities for our VPS to be to get together. And this is a year long journey, we are halfway through, well, more than halfway through now, getting the VPS V together, developing trust, helping them to inspire trust with each other, helping them to really create the vision and execute on those strategies and learn how to coach their team members. And again, this is a cohort base, but this one's more about really offering this to all VPS VP across the globe. And that's where I got to travel in Europe recently to also roll out this program for senior leaders in Berlin and Barcelona and really enjoy the time helping our leaders there. And it's really a global initiative to kind of elevate our senior leaders in terms of leadership development. 

Micaela Mathre 19:56 

I'd like to drill down a little bit and actually talk about middle managers. So at LifeRive, we're super focused on, and I'll just cut to the chase here. We're big advocates for managers as multipliers. We think that they really are foundational to the growth of any business and something we say, and we have just seen across the number of high-performing, fast-growing companies that we work with that no great company was ever built without great managers, and yet at the same time, you know, I recently read a study who was published in 2025 where Gartner estimated that by 2026, 20% of organizations will leverage AI to eliminate more than half of their current management roles. So I'm really kind of middle management roles. I'm really curious about like what your perspective is when it comes to the role of the middle manager and how you think about them at Fabletics. 

Will Feng 20:56 

And we'll say, I cannot kind of predict the future of what AI will look like. Some people feel like it will be like doomsday day, like the world's ending or the other is like AI utopia, like we're all going to work with AI smoothly. And I might be, it might be in the middle, I don't know, but what I do know is that the middle manager managers play a vital role for the organization. And to your point, from my experience with many clients and an organization in the past, like manager enablement is so important, like, because they are between the upper management and the ICs and they play a big role in terms of giving feedback, receiving, requesting feedback about coaching, dealing with conflicts and able to kind of communicate and manage expectations for their, their teams, even play that big role at important roles, you know, having the one-on ones for their teams. So I don't foresee like AI doing all of that in the next, you know, three year, one to three years, because I think people are still important in terms of that process of, you know, playing a role in the middle manage as middle manager and helping their team to get the work done and also planning and being strategic as well. And AI will help with some efficiency in terms of like process optimizations with tooling and maybe something around like augmentation of like working with people kind of like chat GPT or co-pilot, or even helping with automation of processes. I think in the age of AI, human managers play an even more important role because it's about helping their team to learn and develop their AI literacy around, right, the AI knowledge skills, but also developing and coaching their teams. I see AI playing more of a augmentation role, like augmenting what the managers will be doing, or maybe around managing workload, project management, leveraging AI or meeting note taking, right? Like from using AI tool, but managers are still an important role of like motivation, inspiring team, building trust. I think people are still kind of navigating building trust with AI because AI can hallucinate. So like, I think that trust component is key in the middle management is how might we inspire, how might we develop, extend and restore trust. And that's the key component of what people managers play. It's not just the work. It's not just the projects, the milestones. It's also about the people because people want to be seen, want to be heard, be recognized. And of course, if it's all done by AI, I think how I'm just curious how people will feel about those human components or elements. 

Micaela Mathre 23:36 

Yeah, absolutely. And it actually makes me think about what you were just mentioning before around you're such a proponent of cohort based learning. At the end of the day, I mean, we still need people to collaborate and work together. And that is like foundational to how LND leaders think about your role. And you just kind of broke it down for us across all these learner segments. Like, tell me a little bit more about when you say like cohort based learning is critical. What does that look like for you? Or what kind of brought you to that conclusion? Where you could, I mean, you could put folks through asynchronous, you know, I think of it sort of as like so low learning experiences. There's a lot of that out there in the marketplace, but but tell me about this cohort based model and why that's important to your strategy. 

Will Feng 24:21 

Why I really love be cohort based because we really weave, weave in diversity inclusion into our design, meaning like the core base really foster this inclusive environment of team learning or I call organizational learning. Because whenever we're having cohort based learning, it's not like in some of the colleges where you have professor teaching, having a lecture, telling you sharing and write the knowledge is more about the people learning from each other. And then through that reflection with the facilitator. And I know life laughs is doing fantastic job there. Like facilitating that conversation, bring out the insights from each person versus having this expert teaching. Of course, still part of that process of having an expert, a subject matter expert in terms of a topic like coaching or feedback or influencing skills. But then it's really each learners, each employee also has a lot of experience in the area, whether it's mistakes that they, they made, or something. If it's a manager, maybe they have bright spots that they want to share. So, and that's where I believe that when we are kind of leverage each individual's wisdom saying sites in a cohort based program, it's even more, it's richer than just having this expert. And on top of that is this sense of belonging. When we have a cohort, they feel like they are supporting each other. And when we facilitate or kind of like kick off these type of programs, cohort based program, I always say like, we don't want to leave anyone behind. We want every single person to graduate from the program. And that's building to our cohort program is as a company, right? We want to be wanting, want to drive and innovate as wanting together, want to go far, not just go fast. 

Micaela Mathre 26:07 

That's actually a great segue into, I was just chatting with Sheena who's your impact consultant here at LifeLabs and she was sharing, she's like, you got to talk with Will about their attendance rates because for the RISE IC program that we partner on with you, you've got 90% attendance rates and you know, just to remind listeners that's your IC program and like you mentioned that that kind of camaraderie and sense of community is so critical to that. So I'd love to hear a little bit about like, can you give us a secret sauce? Like how do you achieve such strong attendance rates? What goes into that? 

Will Feng 26:44 

really proud of that 90% plus participation. I think part of that is from our people. And there, I will say there are three strategies that I can share with the listeners here. One is really around communication. So communication, communication, communication. And that's where I see when I mentioned communication is around like internal branding and marketing of our programs. Right? So in the past, before I joined the program, with a lot of actually fantastic programs, LND programs, but we did not talk enough about them. So like people, unless you're self-nominated 

or your manager nominates for you, or maybe you see this email, maybe once every six months, you're like, okay, I want to join. And that's where I was like, there were opportunities where we can communicate more as an LND team, right? Letting our people know. And like every month, like we stand in front of our employees at our, we call huddle or all hands meeting to let people know here are the programs that's rolling out. These are the programs for next week. And it's not only about LND, there's other people topics, but we always want to remind people. And I know from a psychology perspective, we want to see at least seven times, communicate seven times to kind of help people remember, right? And that's what we do is to continue to communicate to our people for first for enrollment of our LND programs. So it's just continue kind of ingrained like design in our part of our culture, both physically, digitally, and to communicate. And we also part of that is celebrate. So when people are going through this program, say with life labs, we celebrate their graduation with the program and, and we give them high fives, we kind of talk about it at our, our all hands meeting. And then we send individual email to their manager and like congratulate their team members, investing their time for development. So that's kind of like the communication celebration of kind of like, it's a positive thing. It's not like something that people team or HR team want you to do. It's not something we just assign and go do it. We want people to feel proud of investing time in them. We want their manager to feel proud that their team members want to grow. And kind of that mechanic that reflected in our employee engagement surveys. Yeah. So like our growth have growth scores, for example, for our employee engagement survey from great place to work have increased more than 15% or 15 points in the past two years and also kind of contribute to a sense of growth and career development at the company. 

Micaela Mathre 29:17 

So that 15% increase you attribute to folks having additional learning resources and development. 

Will Feng 29:26 

Because Michaela, I will say one quick story was that when I first joined the company, I was like, oh, we have a lot of already existing programs. And when people talked to me, I was like, okay, we're part of the LND team or talent development team. And they're like, oh, I've never heard about it, but tell me more about it. Or like, never, never heard about these. I was like, we have been implementing this program for, for example, before I joined the company for one or two years. And people have never heard about the program. So that's really not great. Like we need to kind of communicate more and let people know that even that if they're not joining the program, they see them across, right? They see them at the huddle, they hear their manager talk about it, they hear their peers joining lifelapse learning, they're like, okay, they feel a sense of growth within the organization. It's everywhere. And so that's kind of like the, the first part. And then the others around more around like design, how we design the program is where we, if people like miss the first session, the kickoff of lifelapse, we kind of notch them. So we're like, Hey, remember, like we kind of remind them, right? Instead of just like not telling them, we remind them and notch them gently like, Hey, you missed the first one, please join the second lifelapse learning, right? And then that applies to all our LND programs. And then the third part is around, you know, we talk about the community, right? Like when we have this community, we have people to kind of work with each other. Sometimes we'll assign accountability partner. So when they have like a partners in the program, they feel like more motivated to show up not only for the contents, but for the people, their friends waiting for the program. 

Micaela Mathre 31:04 

Yeah, really personalizing it. I love this approach and, you know, obviously I would been breathe marketing and in marketing we think of this as air cover. It's like how many times and how many places can we reiterate? And I love it. The rule of thumb is seven times, right? Like you need to hear something seven times to really retain it and remember it. And I think what you just shared with listeners is so helpful because 

you shared all these internal channels that are specific to Fabletics, right? Like some of us have a campus with screens and some of us don't, and some have an intranet and others have all company meetings every Friday. And I think it's really just thinking and, you know, working with your internal comms folks and thinking about like, where are the opportunities to sort of plug in and reiterate these opportunities? Because you're right. The first barrier is just awareness. Like does, you know, in the marketing funnel, it's definitely like, does everybody know that these are available? Much less have they, you know, sort of opted in. I'd love to kind of dive in now and chat really a little bit more expansively and open about AI and L and D. So we started the top of the hour talking about how your role has actually recently kind of been re-scoped. You shared with listeners about this onsite and how that actually produced a workshop that you launched company wide. I'm curious to hear about that. Can we talk, you know, kind of more generally, I know you're really plugged into the L and D world and you've got a lot of like friends and colleagues kind of across industries in this role. And I'm just curious, like how do you see L and D's role in preparing the workforce for this kind of AI driven transformation? And maybe I develop that question. It's not just preparing, but like responding, right? Because we're, it's no longer like we're in it. Now we're in it. It's like every day, you know, yeah, I can speak to it in marketing, but like we're using these tools. And what role does L and D play at sort of like the highest, most strategic level? 

Will Feng 32:56 

Yeah, love that question because I believe LMD team play a vital role in terms of AI adoption and enablement. I think even more so than other people team, right? Of course talent acquisition, there's a lot of opportunity there, but from an internal perspective, all people team or HR team members play an important role there, like leveraging AI. I think a lot of companies from experience, from networking and from some of the webinars and podcasts, like they're trying to figure this out. And I think for in terms of LMD professional, like we play a huge, you know, a very important role in terms of this transformation or AI transformation, because we play a role of developing our people and organization at large, that's always my mindset. We're not just here for training. We are here to help people navigate change and learning and growing is about change, right? And that's where, how I view AI enablement and the roles of LMD is around change leadership, right? It's around how do we develop this leader mindset, AI first leaders mindset for our people. And then also around how do we develop a AI first culture, right? So earlier we talked about this culture design. I think LMD leaders play a very important role there. And I think the first step there is to help our workforce. Our people responding to AI is around giving them, I think working with the technology and engineering or design team, right? The operations team is to offer the tools available, encourage people to try AI, right? So that's always the first step is being aware of AI and then give them the tool, for example, at that politics, we actually have enterprise chat GPT. We're encouraged every single person to use AI versus, you know, just use, you know, figure out your own tools. Like we actually offer this. We offer education and workshops and resources for people to learn about prompting, to learn about asking better questions and ask, helping them to personalize their AI tools. So like, I think that's really the first step is being aware and then being, you know, open, right? Being curious. So curiosity is one of the key mindsets of AI, you know, learning about AI is being curious about what are the tools out there? How can I use this every single day? How can I use it every hour to be better using AI? And, and that's the first step is responding, helping our people to respond to AI in a way that we provide the tools. So there's no confusion around, do I use copilot? Do I use chat GPT? Do I use Gemini? Like, right. There are so many tools out there. People can still use those tools, but want to have a centralized tools and governance around AI and AI adoption. And then the other part of that is helping our people to understand where they are. And so we launched our AI surveys. We have actually have launched two surveys so far at the organizational level, understand how they're feeling about it, what they're, what tools you're using, what the opportunity, and there's many more questions. 

Will Feng 36:00 

And that's where we use the data and insights from those surveys. And then to understand where, where people are today. And of course they, they, uh, the results varied and there are some people feel excited, there are people feel anxious. So using those data to see, uh, to meet where people are, right. And, uh, and then that's where we have built out different, I call it the intervention. So like we have different 

community. I think the first step is let people know it's urgent. Like that's this emergency, like, yeah, yeah. So that's the first step is about changes. Like we need to feel to know this is important. We can now wait till next year. We cannot wait till two years to kind of roll out systems and tools and mindset and workshops. And, and we need to act now. And so that's what we have been communicating to our people internally. It's like a sense of urgency, the tools we're providing, we're very supportive, supportive of our people trying, experimenting AI within the boundary of security and compliance and all that and safety. And, and then now we have our newly established AI department now. So yeah, so we have a dedicated AI department with people from operations, from data science, from engineering and tech team. And I cannot help from a people team perspective in terms of in parallel, building our AI first mindset, developing AI first mindset, building our AI Academy internally, and then enabling our leaders to use the tools and develop themselves in terms of their AI literacy. And then, and of course, helping to design AI into our employee lifecycle or employee journey. 

Micaela Mathre 37:38 

Sure. So interesting. Everything you described, it's just such an interesting time to be in the learning, corporate learning space, right? And I love, I often, you know, get to talk with so many folks like yourselves and so many people leaders. And I love thinking of like L&D as sort of the learning engine at the organization and what you just described around surveying employees. And then what I heard was a couple of things I heard. We're surveying them on the tools, the tech, but we're scared about, and those are critical inputs, but obviously what you take and do with, okay, these are, this is the tech stack. Here's what folks are using versus here's how people are feeling about these changes. And I think that's really, really powerful, you know, especially I'm on a lot of conversations with executive leaders these days. And we're just talking about like, okay, how do we sort of manage both? Just to get a little specific, I've got a follow up question for you. So you've deployed chat DPT, you've got the enterprise edition at Fabletics. Who is sort of at the table cross functionally to bring something like that into the workplace? What does that look like? 

Will Feng 38:46 

Yeah, and that's tied to can I talk about like the sense of urgency, kind of like the second step is building a community. So we have we call AI champions community. And they're, yeah, across all functions. I think it's, I think a lot of people more than 30, like champions across it marketing sales, right and retail fulfillment center and all that like tech and, and even regionally, we have a representative getting together every month to cannot be the change agent or change leader for AI for their functions. And that's where we have the centralized governance model and then like sharing and at the same time is working with this community to co create and that's working progress right now is co create learning contents for people. And that's where I believe the peer to peer learning or social learning is so important, because it's not just the core team, like rolling out programs, or we buy these AI contents or resources, it's like, we want to enable our leaders are champions to also co create these contents and having these like regular lunch and learns and in AI sessions with our employees. 

Micaela Mathre 39:55 

It's so interesting, yeah, the AI champions, I've heard that from some others and I think that's really critical. What balance do you think that L and D should strike between technical upskilling? So think about that in terms of like AI literacy and the human skills, the people skills. Some of the things we just talked about around adaptability, collaboration, also change management and sort of transformation. Like what is the balance there and how are you thinking about that? 

Will Feng 40:21 

Yeah, I think there's opportunity where we can play both parts and really having this holistic view of building out the technical catalog, right? And earlier I talked about the AI Academy, we're really looking at the different level of beginner, intermediate, advanced level of learners and employees on AI. And we also have the tools around like how to use chat GPT, how to use design tool like mid-journey or Adobe, right? And, and so there are different tools and technology that we will be working with our internal SMEs or subject matter experts and then also external vendors to offer these contents at the same time. We're building a lot of the, um, continue to offering the human skills because I believe that the, the change management, right? We talk about the leadership around feedback, asking powerful question with AI tool, those are the human skills that we all already have. And I think even more important today, because even if we think about emotional intelligence, right? Like in a before AI will be like, we all need to know how to express our emotions, manage or regulate our emotions better and our manage our stress better. And now with AI, a lot of the time is when we are dealing with AI tools, right? How do we interact with AI? That's also require emotional intelligence skills and human skills. And that's why human skills are more important in the age of AI is how we interact with each other. Of course, how we interact with the AI. I learned more about myself when I'm dealing with, when I'm talking to AI nowadays, like using chat GBT or having a conversation with AI when I'm driving or when I'm talking during my work or, or, you know, outside of work is that I learned a lot, a lot about myself because I might get frustrated when AI is not giving me the right answers or I hear people bully or abuse AI. I was like, don't do that. Like actually the way you're interacting with AI, whether it's chatting or talking to AI is more about you, it's more about your leadership. And that's great opportunity as we are using AI is cat reflect and think about opportunity, we can get better. And, and that cannot tie to the LMD offering the leadership development programs we're offering kind of help people to kind of work with AI as they're developing their human skills. And then we talk about curiosity, right? There are three important mindsets, AI first mindset, curiosity. How do we be more curious about the tool, about the processes? And the other part is around how do we adaptability? How do we be able to adapt to the tools, the new process? That's also a very important leadership skills. And that's where we're continue to try to invest in that in the area as well. And then thirdly is around team learning. How do we learn together? How do we develop each other? So those are already important skills we are developing our people. 

Micaela Mathre 43:12 

I appreciate that response and that it's a Bofand, right? And I think, you know, something that we're really passionate about at Life Labs and we've just kind of seen across our client base is team learning, right? So I oftentimes think about, I'm like, yes, there's so much that we can learn through AI and through dialogue with chat TPT, but team-based learning also allows for practice and how critical is it to have real-time practice with humans because humans are so unpredictable. Like you might think when the AI hallucinates, it's unpredictable, but like people will always be more unpredictable, right? And the ability to learn together and practice together, I think is so critical because that truly is never gonna go away. Like in order to build great companies, we will always have to collaborate with other people. And that I think is where there's this huge opportunity for L&D to really lead the charge. And I think that's so much of what our conversation has been about, so I really appreciate you. What advice do you have for other L&D professionals? Does it look like to sort of re-skill themselves to remain relevant? And maybe that's the wrong framing, so you tell me, but re-scale or up-scale themselves to remain relevant in this sort of AI-driven learning ecosystem that I would argue is not coming, but is really here. 

Will Feng 44:36 

Yeah. I think one part of Michaela you touched on earlier is practice and doing practice doing and using AI every single day. And plus joining those, you know, networking, uh, like lunches or events externally, and of course there's opportunity to kind of take online courses and, and different way, like read a book and podcasts. There are tons of podcasts around AI and, um, and that's where I will encourage the LMD professional to really use those opportunity to not only like learn about AI, but actually do it every single day and practice experimenting with AI every single day and plus go out there, right? In the world, like don't just stay within your complex, go out having conversation with people, whether it's in the function of technology or engineering. I actually recently joined a dinner with a bunch of really great leaders, not just all in human resource, HR LMD, but they are from product management. They're from media and marketing and we all talk about AI, but from a different perspective, and that's very eyeopening for me, because at the end of the day, it's about the business is around the people learning is part of that change. And I think the more we can learn about, you know, how, where people are at and like in terms of their work, their roles, their skills, the more we can kind of help them, I will also say, like, if you see opportunity, I think there are plenty of opportunities around AI in the future, or even now for LMD is in anybody, right? Like is to raise your hand and kind of speak up and not like coming back to my early story is to take the leap of faith of like, okay, I don't know this yet, but how, how can I try this out? How can I be part of this team and invite yourself to the party? And even though you might feel uncomfortable, invite yourself to the AI party. And that's kind of what I did early day. It's like, okay, there are a lot of things going on, maybe hundreds of things going on. People are throwing different learning resources around AI. But like I was like, okay, we need to centralize this. We need to, there's opportunity that can be helpful. 

Micaela Mathre 46:35 

I love that. I think that's a great call to action actually for listeners. Invite yourself to the AI party, right? Because I think, and I think learning leaders, HR leaders are uniquely positioned to do that in the sense that it's like, no, I mean, you know, sometimes I call it the wild West. Cause I'm like, nobody really knows we're in marketing. We're testing out a bunch of stuff. We're trying to throw in stuff against the wall. We're seeing what sticks and that mindset of curiosity, but also just like get at the table, right? Because you don't know the conversation that's happening if you're not at the table. And I think that's super helpful. And honestly, a great question to sort of answer to tie us off is invite yourself to the AI party and who knows what'll happen. Maybe you'll get it in your title and your scope will change, but really exciting time. 

Thank you so much for joining us. Well, it was really wonderful to have you. I learned so much. And if folks want to get in touch with you, if they have follow up questions, what's the best place to find you? What spaces are you in? 

Will Feng 47:33 

I'm most active on LinkedIn. So please connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find my name, William Feng. And I look forward to connecting with you all. And don't hesitate to reach out. Say hi or any questions. 

Micaela Mathre 47:45 

Wonderful. Thank you so much for that, Will. And we'll link that in the show notes as well. And some of the things we talked about and chatted through, you can find additional resources down below. Will mentioned to joining webinars and content and just continuously learning yourself. So we have upcoming webinars you can go to our website to learn about. We have a couple in October on the same exact topic. Are there other places, Will, that you'd encourage people to go to sort of continue their learning? Like what are some resources that you found useful as a way? 

Will Feng 48:17 

I know there are tons of podcasts online and whether you're using Spotify or Apple. So there's one called the AI daily brief. So if you're on it, check it out. It's really great podcast. And, um, yeah, just immerse yourself while you're driving or at lunch. So definitely. 

Micaela Mathre 48:35 

I'm going to I'm going to subscribe to that. Yeah.